Improve Sales Archives - Bike Lane Business Development

The other side of the coin

from Shep Hyken

file under Sales

Aaaaand, with our dissenting opinion on marketing automation, is Mr. Hyken! Shep Hyken has a pretty good post about not overdoing automation, specifically, don’t automate your customer service. He says, "customers are more loyal to the employee—so much so that almost half (48%) will follow their favorite employee if they leave to work at a competing business.

So you need to keep that relationship personal.

Contacts Solution

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Contacts Solution

from HubSpot

file under Sales

Not those kinds of contacts...

More sales are lost from bad contact follow-up than bad salespeople (well, if you don’t follow up, you are a terrible salesperson, but you know what I mean). If you can nail your contact management strategy, you will be far ahead of your competitors.

HubSpot has a post on how to nail your contact management strategy, it’s a 4 min read, but the project will take longer to build well.

They say that there are 4 basic components :

Contacts
Database Management
Lead Nurturing
Conversion

Read about how to connect these and build a strategy for success here:

Photo by Hubble on Unsplash

Cold calls??? Seriously???

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Cold calls??? Seriously???

from Duct Tape Marketing

file under Sales

It has been a long time since I’ve heard any positive comments about cold calling, but this podcast episode had a frank discussion about it that hit home on a couple of points for me. It’s worth a listen. He also has an offer at the end to get his book and some training videos for free.

Read the post HERE

Photo by Dias on Unsplash

To improve sales, you need to define the process first

Improve Sales

Hubspot had a great infographic on their blog. I liked it’s uncomplicated view of the sales process and wanted to share it here with you. You may add, or subtract from this list, but this is almost the same exact process that I have used for 30 years. The reason I share it is that I have quite a few clients that do not have a formal written sales process.

If it is not written down, you cannot define it.
If it is not defined, you cannot measure it.
If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

So, write it down, define it, measure it, and improve it! It’s critical if you want to effectively improve sales. Hubspot is a marketing software company that focuses on inbound marketing. At the same time, they have an emerging sales software business as well. They have introduced a CRM (that I use, and love) as well as other very useful add-ins.

Courtesy of Hubspot You can read Hubspot’s original post here